The COVID-19 Experience is an Experience with Natural Order.
This is Mother Nature seeking Balance.
The novel Coronavirus pandemic that the whole world is currently experiencing is an experience with Mother Nature. Even if your lens is the conspiracist theory of biological warfare, it’s still a natural event. Fighting over resources is a naturally occurring behavior in many other species as well. But it’s not human versus human biological warfare - it’s more like Mother Earth versus human biological warfare. It’s our entire global ecosystem’s immune response to our species’ recent evolutionary trend towards growth for the sake of growth, an ideology that quite perfectly describes the behavior of the cancer cell, as once noted by the author Edward Abbey.
It might require some humility for all of us as humankind to accept that our place in this universe is not the center, but we have to change our egocentric collective consciousness - and if we can, there’s actually a lot of relief to be had from our consciousness’s current anxiety. Up until last week most humans living in a developed country may have gone about their daily lives as if the world revolved around making more money and more humans, but all it has taken is the fear of quite a bit more of us dying this year than average and a great many are sitting at home, blindsided by and perhaps struggling with the question of what is actually essential activity. According to the largely accepted outlook, we are going to have plenty of time to work through that question.
A perfect example - if you have kids, it’s still essential that an adult human is protecting those little humans and ideally teaching them valuable skills to live a rich and full life, even though they can’t go off to school to get that experience from someone else. But what’s not essential is making more humans, just because we are cooped up at home with our partners. There have been some pretty witty lines about buying stock in diapers, and what we are going to call the generation of kids born as a result of the shelter at home measures we are using to try to spare our older or weaker friends or loved ones, but that attitude is one half of the equation in our already remarkably imbalanced birth to death ratio in the United States.
Humans are being born in the US at an annual rate of around 11.6 per 1,000 or 3.8 million last year, versus only dying at an annual rate of 8.6 per 1,000 or 2.8 million last year, according to the CDC. That’s to say that in America alone, we are making one million more new humans a year than we are losing, and doing our part to increase the world’s population by 83 million this year. Most of us have enough Facebook friends that we can evaluate this in our own, “real” world, based on whether more of our friends are having babies or dying - and even if you start the habit of unfollowing people once their feed becomes an overwhelming, every-day stream of tiny human pictures, there are clearly more people being born than dying out there.
If you look at a graph of the human population increase over time, it looks a lot like a graph of the spread of COVID-19 infections. We don’t like it when a virus does it, and we don’t tolerate it when another species does it - take for example the controversy over the wolf population’s rebound in the Northern Rockies and Great Basin after their reestablishment, or a mosquito population blossoming in a wet spring, which spurs country club property owners anywhere to implement large scale insecticide application. So, why do we think it’s ok for us to mindlessly, or carelessly, make more humans at a faster rate while we are stuck at home because of a virus - one that quite frankly is only a pandemic because there are already too many humans?
The discussions from within the financial sector and other economically-minded individuals is that the economy is going to come back, and that it will come all the way back - that it will rebound or regrow to the state or size that it was before we had to put it on a temporary hold for more important things. It is quite clear that there are plenty of Americans would like to see that happen sooner rather than later - not just the rebound part in general, but also that we see enough rapid economic redevelopment to put us, as quickly as possible, back to the comfort levels we each had in our pre-Rona financial lives. But as we come back from this experience, it’s important that we do so with a new standpoint on social and economic sustainability. We need to shift the thought process of our egocentric collective consciousness to one that is informed by and supportive of what is actually necessary for our long term health and happiness - which includes the health of all species on the planet as well as the health of the Earth itself.
If all we focus on is the ideological belief in growing again just for the sake of growth, surely the economy will rebound, but we should not allow that to become our priority as individuals or as a nation. We have just experienced the longest period of uninterrupted, unchecked economic growth in America’s history - and there seems to be a great deal of discontent about the reality that it couldn’t just go on that way forever. There is no example anywhere in the universe of anything being able to continue growing forever, and we are the only species that tries to operate in blatant disregard, or at least ignorance, to that truth. Those of us that live closer to the natural world might agree the truth is that everything is cyclical. If you step away from the world of man for a moment and consider that mountains are eroded into grains of sand, stars burn out, species go extinct, and surely even the age of man will come to an end, it might be a little easier to see that we are all mindlessly participating in an incredibly civilized version of a competition for resources - more resources than we actually need.
We need to engender a more widespread and deeply held understanding about how the health and wellness of the human species is interconnected with the health and wellness of the earth, a symbiotic relationship without which we cannot exist. Continued, rapid human population growth will certainly result in more experiences of acute, traumatic population die-off due to disease, or increasingly, wars for actual resources (instead of the imaginary resource modern wars are fought over - money). The accompanying rapid, unsustainable economic growth and resultant consumption and destruction of natural resources will also act to lower the number of humans that the earth can healthily sustain as well - further critically imbalancing our growing species’ demand for food, water, and shelter, and our host’s faltering ability to provide them. We have to do something different if we wish to ensure the long term survival of the human species - even perhaps if we want there to be happy, healthy humans on this planet just several generations from now.
This is our cue to slow down and get better at the basics - doing what is essential for life, and especially what is essential for a happy, healthy life. That’s all a lot of us can do right now, anyways. If you are at home with your kids, or your family, you get to spend more time with your family! That is so essential for the health and happiness of the next generation of humans. There are plenty of humans out there that would’ve loved it if their dad, or mom, was around more instead of working all the time. It’s like mother nature is hitting the reset button and giving us the opportunity to get back to doing better at what is truly important in life.
In many ways, when we return to what most humans would consider normal, everyday life, we need to keep living like we are being asked to live right now. We need to drive less, even if all that means is going to the grocery store once a week instead of every other day. A lot of us need to bike, ski, hike, walk, or work out more, and explore a healthier and more ecologically responsible diet. Many of us will also benefit greatly if we learn to slow down and breathe, meditate, pray, or otherwise relax, and become more aware of our own mental and spiritual health, and learn how to nurture self. If we learn to be happy with less, and to conserve resources, then perhaps we can work less, allowing us to spend more time with our wives, husbands, children, and friends. But, we have to remember that just because we get to spend more time with our wives, husbands, or friends does not mean that we should be making more children. Even if its for the simple reason that having more children would defeat the intention of having more time…